Skill Awareness Trumps Skills – Do You Know?

I had an interesting thought a few weeks ago. It occurred to me that for all the emphasis we put on learning, training, and practicing in order to gain shooting skills we are perhaps overlooking something that is more important than high levels of proficiency. A core part of the training/practice cycle that is foundational and arguably more important than high levels of skill.

What is that thing? I'll call it skill awareness, and it is simply knowing your current level of proficiency.

Most Gun Owners Have Absolutely No Idea How Proficient They Are

I suspect the reason this topic is top of mind is due to several recent conversations and range sessions with friends, customers, and shooters I've met at trade shows.

One of the more complex things about the self-defense gun owner community is the lack of knowing what any given self-defense gunfight might require in terms of skills. It's the equivalent of being on a football team and not knowing if your team is ever going to actually play a game and should the game suddenly come upon you; not knowing if you will be facing off with a little league football adversary, a NFL team, or some skill level in the middle.

That massive amount of speculation, lack of consistent meaningful data, and unpredictable nature of self-defense preparation leads us to exercise an equal amount of ambiguity about our own pistol performance abilities.

After all, if everyday people successfully defend themselves every day in this country then it goes to argue that average gun owner skills are sufficient and each of us can easily accept our skills are average.

However, the untold story is that gun owners also fail at self-defense on a regular basis because their skills are lacking, or perhaps because not knowing the limitations of their own skills led them to make poor tactical decisions.

Then of course there is the reality that measuring your own competency is scary.  Acknowledging that you may not be very good at something or not as good as your image of yourself previously thought is a difficult pill to swallow.

Combine those attitudes with an even more challenging reality. It isn't an easy thing to measure pistol performance for most gun owners. Sure accuracy is fairly straightforward. Go to the gun range and aim at the target and squeeze the trigger. There you go. Sadly, that kind of marksmanship test does very little to indicate one's capacity for performance in self-defense.

Understanding Your Current Level of Skill Guides Your Decisions

Imagine a scenario in which you are sitting in a restaurant and the bad guy comes in and points a gun at the clerk behind the register. You aren't completely out of their line of sight and you don't know yet what level of violence they are there to inflict. They get the cash from the register and shoot the employee behind the counter and turn the gun toward the patrons of the restaurant.

As they go table to table asking for cash and jewelry you are becoming more and more convinced that you have to respond. They have shown a capacity and inclination toward taking life but when should you act? As they nervously pivot their head back and forth scanning everyone including you; do you have the time necessary to draw and fire before they turn their gun in your direction?

Well, how fast is your draw to first shot? Have you trained doing it sitting down and if so how will that impact your response time? At the current distance to the bad guy how much time will it take you to get the necessary sight picture to land shots?

Certainly the faster/better you are at running your gun the better off you are in this situation but I would argue that even more important than being really good, is knowing how good you actually are.

Knowing how quickly you can get accurate shots on the bad guy dictates when it's your turn to act.

What Skills Should We Be Measuring & How Do We Do That?

There are many skills that can be isolated and measured such as draw speed, reloads, recoil management, transition speed, etc those are micro elements of a self-defense response.

Measuring any of those individually gives you focused data and helps you to identify the places where you need to work to improve.

However, in my opinion, I feel that the most important things to measure are draw to the first shot and recoil management. Basically how long does it take me to go from a go signal (decision to act) to having my first shot on target AND how quickly can I get follow-up shots on target accurately?

These skills are traditionally measured using standardized drills and a shot timer. A shot timer provides a start signal and then measures the time from that start signal to the first shot and then continues to measure the time between shots and the total elapsed time since the original start signal and the last shot fired. Shot timers are not inexpensive tools but are affordable to those who shoot often and care about knowing their current level of skill and working to improve on that skill.

I wanted to add that distance is a major factor. I know how long it takes me to draw and get an accurate shot on a human-size target at 5 yards but I also know how long it would take me at 15 yards and the time difference is significant in a self-defense environment. There are other factors too. How does my speed change if I'm sitting down? If I'm sitting in my car?

Measuring Skills Accelerates Growth

There is another advantage to shifting our focus from Skills to Skills Awareness. It tends to drive skill in the end. If we ask ourselves, our friends, and our students to worry less about being amazing and instead focus on gaining awareness of one's current abilities we not only prepare that person with that current level of skill for the fight but we also give them a baseline of measurement which is likely to incentivize them to practice and grow.

So, do you know your current skill level?